Black Water

by Louise Doughty

  He stepped over the threshold. There was no breakfast waiting for him on the desk – that meant that Kadek had not been that morning, that the hut had been left tidy and emptied and unlocked all night while he had been at the guesthouse. He walked into the hut, leaving the door behind him pushed wide open, to admit the light. He went over to the shutters and opened them, pushing them back against the outside wall, and then all was filled with daylight inside, albeit still silent. He stood for a moment in the centre of the room.

  Packing his few things wouldn’t take long. Perhaps Kadek would come later.

  He went down to the river for a walk.

  He came back and made himself some powdered coffee.

  He grew hungry, and found the remainder of a packet of biscuits that he had left in a cupboard, a dry remnant of one of his few trips to the mini-market in town.

  He sat on the veranda for a bit, watching the view, then went back inside and, suddenly tired in the full heat of the day, lay down and took a nap on the immaculate bed. When he woke, he climbed off the bed, still a little sleepy, looked at the creased sheets and felt a sense of trespass – he never normally slept during the day. He tugged at the edges of the sheets and then neatened them with the flat of his hand, so that Kadek would not have to do it when he showed up later, and as he straightened, it came to him what was familiar about Johan. He stood for a moment in the middle of the room, then turned to the corner cupboard, where he kept the whisky and the cigarettes.

  There was no trace of moon. He had to navigate by holding his hands out in front of him, feeling the tree trunks and then grasping them and hauling himself slowly round. Once he was through the trees, he stood at the edge of the rice field, in the pitch dark, the men with machetes only metres behind him, and watched as the red tail light of the motorcycle disappeared down the rise. That was all he saw, in the blackness, that one, small, round red light, his chance of escape, dropping down the track, disappearing as if into the earth – and then there was nothing but night, and he was alone in the rice field and the men were hunting him and they would have heard the sound of the motor for certain and be heading his way. Wayan had done more than leave him alone in the dark: he had drawn the men towards him.

  He stepped carefully away from the trees, towards the rise, lifting his feet slowly so as not to make splashing sounds in the mud and water, although his breath sounded so loud in his own chest, he could scarcely believe it was not giving him away. The men were nearby, he knew it, perhaps standing still and listening for any sign of him, but every now and then, there was a shout or a scream from the burning house on the other side of the field. The men’s companions were still killing Komang’s family. The noises would distract the men, perhaps, and if he stayed motionless, invisible, they might return to the main task in hand.

  He should have let Wayan use a light, even if it had risked him being discovered: to leave the man alone in the dark in a water field – how stupid of him, he only had himself to blame.

  It was then he saw a movement, a shadow to his left, no more than the shift of something lighter in the dark, pale clothing perhaps, against the black wall of the treeline. The breath froze in his throat. In daytime, shadows were dark: in this pitch black, they were light. If Wayan had seen this ghost-shape moving around in the dark, of course he would have cracked.

  The ghost flickered, whimpered, clutched his arm, thin fingers digging into his flesh. He grabbed at a bony shoulder and at that point a cloud above them must have shifted a little; there was a small amount of moonlight. He pulled the ghost towards him. It was Komang’s wife. He looked down into her face, which was a rictus of fear. She must have been the fleeing shadow he had seen when he had watched the men murder Komang – she had been hoping to draw the men away from her home, her children. If so, she must know by now it was a strategy that had failed. He wondered how long she had been hiding in the trees, too terrified to return to her house, too terrified to run, perhaps hoping that one or two of the other household members had been able to flee in the chaos. And then she had realised that the tall figure she could just about see emerging from the trees was Harper, the stranger who had come to the house earlier that day, the man who her husband said was a friend.

  He was holding her by the shoulder but she was also holding him, seizing his arm in a bony grip. They stood clutching at each other. For a moment or two they were both just clinging and breathing and he saw, mirrored in her petrified gaze, his own fear. He lifted a finger to his mouth, then, to indicate she should be silent, although his own breath was coming louder than hers.

  He heard a scuffle in the undergrowth, turned, saw the glow of a flaming torch – and with no warning, the men were upon them. The ones holding the torch were further away than the ones who had come close in the dark, who had emerged from the trees behind Komang’s wife. They must have been the party hunting her, not the one hunting him: the one hunting him was the more distant group. He felt a moment of fury that she had not only frightened Wayan away but led them to him. If she had stayed hidden in the trees, he would not have been discovered. He could have dropped down into an irrigation ditch while they were upon her.

  These thoughts were swift – at once, several of the men grabbed her and she screamed and babbled in fear and they shouted back and the men with the torches came running, their feet splashing in the water.

  They were surrounded then – between fifteen and twenty men, he estimated. It was hard to tell in the dark, with the shifting shadows thrown by the torches: each figure lit by orange had a shadow figure in black: in the dark, the men were doubled.

  He knew he had one chance. He drew himself up to his full height and said loudly and firmly in Indonesian, ‘I found her. She was hiding in the trees.’

  The men on the edge of the group were talking excitedly but the two closest to Harper looked at him. One raised a paraffin lantern: Harper could see the oval of his face, questioning. ‘I found her,’ he repeated. ‘She was trying to flee that way. There was a man waiting for her on a motorbike but he left.’

  Komang’s wife was still talking very fast, whimpering and crying with a rise and fall, a rise into a small scream, a fall into a plea, the desperate sound of someone pleading for her life, her children – and one of the men, very small, very young-looking in the orange light, stepped forward and raised both his arms together, elbows bent, then struck her on the side of her head with an object Harper couldn’t see. She gave a single, sharp cry and fell to the ground. The young man looked at Harper then, to see how he would react. Harper kept his face still.

  The boy looked around and the other young men clapped him on the shoulder. Then the group turned back in on itself, began talking excitedly.

  The older man with the oval face was still standing next to Harper. Harper folded his arms, said, ‘What are they saying?’

  The older man lifted his chin – his paraffin lantern swung to and fro, illuminating first one side of his face and one group of men, then the other side of his face and another. Komang’s wife was just visible on the ground, a small heap, silent now, but alive, her breath heaving inside her, the curve of her back rising and falling. ‘First we will put her face then her honour to the fire,’ the man said, nodding towards the flaming torch held by a man on the other side of the group.

  Harper stepped forward. Komang’s wife was still bent in a heap. As he reached her, his feet sank in the mud and the irrigation water rose halfway up his calves. He grabbed the hair on the back of her head – it was loose and fell over his wrist – and she had only time for one final, inarticulate cry before he pushed her face down into the muddy water, put his other hand on the back of her head, and steeled every muscle in his arms to hold her there.

  He was a young man. He was strong. His arms were like iron. And yet, the strength of a woman desperate to live – she got one arm up and began clawing at his forearms. Her legs kicked out behind her, splashing in the water. She even managed to raise her back a little. Who would have thought
such a small woman had that strength? One of the men had lifted a paraffin lantern high to illuminate the scene. Die quickly, Harper thought, for God’s sake, die quickly, or they will stop me killing you. And yet, incredibly, she managed to shift her head a little and he had to use both hands to push her down again. And then one of the men dropped down to sit on her legs to stop them kicking out, and he knew that they would not stop him from killing her. Their own scheme was forgotten.

  Strands of her hair clung across his wrist, the rest floating around her head; the ditch was illuminated black and orange; bubbles were rising through it. He began to count backwards from a hundred, softly, under his breath – he knew his lips were moving although there was no more than a whisper coming from them, one hundred, ninety-nine, ninety-eight . . . Her whole body shook and the hand, small and bony, continued to scrape at his arm . . . eighty-four, eighty-three, eighty-two . . . she dug her fingers into his arm . . . seventy-two, seventy-one, seventy . . . His counting was slow – more than a second per number, he thought: a slow count back from a hundred would be around three minutes. It took longer than that to drown but she was small and had already been face down for a minute or two before he started counting. She would surely lose consciousness soon. Sixty-eight, sixty-seven, sixty-six . . . He did not look up at the men who had gathered round him, watching. They had fallen silent. He concentrated all his effort on keeping the woman’s head beneath the water. Fifty-six, fifty-five, fifty-four . . . he realised he was counting back in numerals but thinking in tens. Forty-two, forty-one, forty . . . The counting became everything. His arms were like rock now. It was the numbers in his head, the soft movements of his lips – that was what he concentrated on. Thirty-three, thirty-two, thirty-one . . . Time had no meaning any more. Only the numbers had meaning. Twenty-eight, twenty-seven, twenty-six . . . He was so nearly there. He just wanted to be there. Fifteen, fourteen, thirteen . . . The men around still said nothing, just stood, and the night insects were blaring and there was a crackle from one of the flaming torches but he could sense they were all motionless even though he didn’t look up. And finally . . . Three, two, ONE!

  Even after he had finished counting, he did not release her. He did not dare. If the job was not finished, she would be burnt to death, and he too, possibly. He stayed where he was, his breath heaving in his chest, waiting.

  And then he realised that the small fingers digging into his arm had eased, some seconds ago, perhaps. The hand lost its grip, fell limp into the water with a tiny splash. He stayed motionless for a minute longer, to see if there were any more bubbles, then released her, took his hands away, but stayed kneeling. The woman lay still. The men around him remained motionless too, looking down.

  Eventually, he looked around the group, got to his feet, unsteadily. He glanced at the older man who had been standing next to him and saw that the look on his face was one of shock. The man had seen not mercy in his actions but efficiency. The men’s desire to torture her was born in heat, and all men understood that actions done in heat were excusable because they were men and that was what men did – but his ruthlessness in drowning Komang’s wife seemed evil to them. Even though they would have taken her and done far worse to her than he had just done, they were, momentarily at least, afraid of him.

  The men had stepped back but then the young one holding the torch moved forward, lifted Komang’s wife up by her shirt. Her body was limp, her arms hanging down, water dripping from the ends of her fingers, her face hidden by the fall of her hair.

  A murmur came from the men. One of them called something out and two of them laughed. Their moment of shocked silence was over. Denied the opportunity to torture her, they would now decide what to do with the body – a poor substitute for the person but one that would do. She would probably be hanging from a tree in the centre of the village in the morning. They would dismember her, perhaps, as they had her husband, her children. If he stayed with them, joined in, he would be safe: they would not question his allegiance now.

  The excitement in the men’s faces: the wide eyes, gritted teeth – you did not need to drink arak all day, like Benni’s men, to have such an expression on your face. He had seen that same excitement on the faces of boys at school in Los Angeles or Amsterdam, on the young men of the Institute during training exercises. He began stepping backwards, into the dark. His feet sounded loud and splashy in the water to him but the men were intent on their conversation. He was halfway back across the field, moving slowly and carefully away from the men and the trees, when he heard a shout. The tone was unmistakeably hostile to his absence. He dropped down then, into the muddy water, took a deep breath, and pushed his own face into the mud.

  Dawn is a promise. That is the mystery of it. It is as if you emerge from the swamp of night cell by cell yet in an instant. You are lying in an irrigation ditch, lying stretched flat in order to submerge yourself as much as possible, with only half your face turned upwards so that you can breathe, keeping your breath as shallow as possible while staying alive, knowing that each second of being alive may be your last because the men with flares and lanterns and machetes are only a few metres away and discovery is possible at any moment.

  The birds announce it: the outlier birds, cheep, cheep, such a tiny, hopeful sound. The first hint of grey appears at the edges of the sky and, after a bit of tuning up, the whole chorus breaks out, the birds’ triumphant orchestra, the musical holler of it, because however black the night has been they are still there and they cry out. The sky is grey and lightening by the minute, and you turn in the ditch, stiff and frozen to the core. You are still afraid but now it is light enough to see across the rice field, growing greener by the minute in the dawn light, that the men with machetes have gone – and you are still alive.

  *

  It took him four months to get to Los Angeles. Wayan may have abandoned him, but he had at least dropped his bag where the moped had been parked. Harper found it as soon as he rose from the irrigation ditch at dawn, snatched it up then headed off at a trotting run, away from the village. There was some money in a secret pocket on the inside of the bag, and his documents: the notes in his money belt had spent a night being soaked in mud and were unusable even after he rinsed them in fresh water and dried them on a rock. That was a week later, when he allowed himself to stop in the same place for more than a few hours.

  He made it to the coast eventually, at one point hiding out on Lovina Beach in Singaraja, in the cabin of a very alcoholic and somewhat demented old Dutchman whose brain was pickled enough to think Harper was his house servant. After three weeks there, he stole the old man’s moped – it hadn’t been ridden in years – got it working and travelled along the coast until he met with a group of hippie dropouts who had been camping for a year, smoking dope and sleeping with each other. He told them his name was Leaf and he was on the run from the CIA, which was possibly, by that time, partly true. The group was only camping for another fortnight and then planning on taking the long route back to San Francisco on freight ships crossing the Pacific. Eventually, he hit Humboldt Bay, where he could access his Bank of America account for enough cash for a flight to Los Angeles.

  He managed to call Nina from a payphone before he got on the flight. When she answered the phone, for a moment or two, he could not speak. She said, ‘Hello . . . ? Hello . . . ? Who is this . . . ?’ Then there was a pause. ‘Hello . . . ?’ He could tell by the tone of that last hello that she was about to hang up so forced himself to say, to spit out almost, ‘Nina, it’s me.’ There was a shocked silence on the other end of the line.

  At Los Angeles airport, he joined a line with three businessmen ahead of him and the occasional cab cruising to the kerb every five minutes or so. Eventually, it was his turn and he got into a battered vehicle driven by a fat white guy in a stained T-shirt who grunted when Harper gave him the address. There was something about the way the cab driver glanced in the rear-view mirror as he got in the back that he didn’t like. While on the move, he had let his
hair grow and adopted a soft, scrubby beard: he looked like the kind of young man other men hated. As they cruised down the slipway, he took a packet of cigarettes from his pocket and lit up, without offering one to the driver, who responded by fumbling for his own cigarettes on the dashboard. They both smoked their different brands in silence all the way.

  ‘Want me to exit at Crenshaw?’ the driver growled when they were on the Santa Monica Freeway, and Harper didn’t know what he meant so he just nodded. This stretch of the freeway was new, had cut the Heights in two by the look of it.

  When they pulled up outside Poppa and Nina’s house, Harper saw the driver stare into the mirror again as he extracted a roll of bills from the side pocket of his holdall. He made a point of glancing at the notes rather than counting them out, then pushed a crumpled heap of them into the driver’s outstretched hand, enjoying the brief look of confusion on his face as he worked out that this particular hippy dropout wasn’t short of dough.

  Harper stood on the pavement while the driver pulled away. After the sound of the engine and the smell of the cab’s exhaust fumes had dissipated, he took a minute or two to breathe: the quiet, sloping street, the houses in an ascending row with their wooden facades painted in different pastel colours, the huge old cactus that was still in the front garden. The sunlight seemed so delicate here, in comparison with where he had come from. Standing on the empty street with the elegant droop of the vine that still twisted round the porch support and his bag at his feet, he realised he had wanted this homecoming so badly that he could not bring himself to mount the steps and knock on the door – the pleasure of this moment was so intense. What could be better than the seconds before you set eyes on someone you know will be overjoyed to see you?